The Boring Habit That Outsells Every Content Strategy for Coaches
TL;DR: Most coaches treat content strategy for coaches as a creative problem. What pillar topics should I write about? What format performs best? Should I be doing Reels? And they end up with a calendar full of content that sounds like every other coach in their space. The boring habit that actually works is a regular cycle of reading what your audience writes when they think nobody’s watching, then using their language in your next piece. Not a strategy session. Not a system. Just structured listening, repeated weekly. One coach I worked with switched from posting motivational quotes three times a week to posting one thing every ten days built on something she’d read in a parenting subreddit the night before. Her enquiries tripled. Not because she got better at content. Because she got better at listening.
I watched a coach spend six months on a content strategy that taught me more than any marketing book
Every content strategy for coaches I’ve ever seen starts the same way. Pillars, schedule, platforms, batch-creation day. This one was no different. She’d done everything right. Content pillars mapped out, posting schedule colour-coded in Notion, three platforms covered, batch-creation Sundays. She had a system. A real one.
Her engagement was flat. Enquiries were rare. And the content she was producing, all of it well-written and technically sound, could have come from any of the two hundred other confidence coaches posting that week.
I was helping her with some audience research at the time, pulling language from forums and online communities as part of the work I do with Pain Point Pulse. What struck me wasn’t that her content was bad. It was that it lived in a completely different vocabulary from the people she wanted to reach.
She wrote about “stepping into your power.” Her ideal clients, on Reddit at midnight, wrote things like “I rehearse what I’m going to say in meetings and then don’t say any of it.”
Same problem. Totally different planet.
The gap wasn’t creative. It wasn’t strategic. It was informational. She didn’t know what her audience sounded like when they weren’t performing for a coach. And no content strategy for coaches, however well-structured, can close that gap. Only listening can.
What actually drives content that sells?
There’s a question worth sitting with before we go further. When you think about your content, what are you spending most of your time on?
If the answer is format, frequency, or platform selection, you’re solving the wrong problem. Those things matter. They’re just not the bottleneck.
The bottleneck, for almost every coach I’ve worked with, is that their content uses professional language to describe problems their audience experiences in deeply personal, messy, unpolished ways. I wrote about this in detail in The Language Gap, but the short version is: your audience doesn’t Google your solution. They Google their problem. And they describe that problem in words you probably don’t use.
A content strategy for coaches that starts with “what should I talk about?” is starting in the wrong place. The first question should be: do I actually know how my audience describes what they’re going through?
Most coaches assume they do. Discovery calls, DM conversations, client intake forms. All useful. All filtered. People talk differently to a professional than they do to strangers on the internet at 2am. The unfiltered version is where your next clients live, because that’s the language they’re using when they search for help.
The boring habit, described plainly
It’s this: spend thirty minutes a week reading what your audience writes in places where they’re being honest.
That’s it. That’s the habit.
Not mining for content ideas, although you’ll get those as a side effect. Not looking for trending topics. Not trying to reverse-engineer an algorithm. Just reading. Specifically, reading Reddit threads, Facebook group posts, Amazon book reviews, forum conversations, anywhere people describe the problem you help with in their own unedited words.
Then, before you write your next post or email or blog article, open what you collected and let their language shape yours.
It sounds so simple it barely qualifies as advice. Which is probably why almost nobody does it consistently.
What this looks like in practice
Monday or Tuesday, whenever you have a quiet half hour. Open Reddit. Search for the problem you help with, not the solution you offer. If you’re a career coach, don’t search “career coaching.” Search “I hate my job but I can’t afford to quit.” If you’re a health coach, search “I know what I should eat but I just don’t.”
Read five to ten threads. Copy any sentences that sound like something your ideal client would think but never say to you directly. Paste them into a running document. Don’t organise them yet. Just collect.
When you sit down to write your next piece of content, open that document first. Let one of those sentences be your starting point.
A parenting coach I know does this every Monday morning. She spends twenty minutes in r/Parenting reading what parents wrote over the weekend. Last month she found a thread where someone described bath time as “the part of the day where I know I’m failing and everyone can see it.” She wrote a post opening with that sentiment. It got more saves, more DMs, and more enquiries than anything she’d posted in six months.
She didn’t get better at content. She got better at listening.
Why is weekly better than a one-off research session?
Because language shifts. Problems surface differently depending on what’s happening in the culture. A financial coach whose audience was worried about inflation in 2023 might find them worried about redundancy in 2026. The vocabulary changes. The emotional texture changes.
A single research sprint gives you a strong foundation. I wrote a full guide to doing that in The Weekend Audience Research Sprint. But a sprint becomes stale if you never go back. The weekly habit keeps your ear tuned. It takes less time than scrolling your own feed, and it delivers more insight than any social media scheduling tool.
There’s also a compounding effect. After a month of collecting, you start seeing patterns. The same phrases keep surfacing. The same frustrations keep appearing in different words. Those patterns become your content pillars, except they’re built from evidence rather than assumption. I explored that compounding cost of assumption-based content in The Guessing Tax.
The typical content strategy for coaches (and why it doesn’t work)
The typical coaching content strategy looks something like this:
Pick three to five content pillars. Create a posting schedule. Batch-create content. Repurpose across platforms. Analyse metrics. Adjust.
It’s not wrong. It’s incomplete. The entire approach assumes you already know what to say. The pillars are chosen from your expertise. The content is created from your vocabulary. The repurposing spreads that vocabulary across more platforms.
If your vocabulary matches your audience’s vocabulary, great. This system will serve you well.
If it doesn’t, and for most coaches it doesn’t, you’re scaling the wrong message. You’re getting more efficient at producing content that sounds like a coach talking to coaches, which is the problem I broke down in Stop Creating Content for Coaches.
The pillar trap
Content pillars are useful as an organising principle. The problem is when they’re generated from expertise rather than from audience data.
A sleep coach might choose pillars like:
- Sleep hygiene
- Stress and sleep
- Creating a bedtime routine
- Mindset and rest
Perfectly reasonable. Also perfectly generic. Every sleep coach in the world would pick similar pillars, because they’re derived from the professional knowledge base.
Now compare that to pillars built from audience language:
- “I’m exhausted but I can’t switch off” (the wired-tired state)
- “I’ve tried everything and I’m still awake at 3am” (solution fatigue)
- “My partner doesn’t understand why I can’t just go to sleep” (relationship strain from insomnia)
- “I’m scared this is going to affect my health long-term” (the fear beneath the tiredness)
Those aren’t just better topics. They’re a different starting point. The first set starts from what you know. The second set starts from what they feel. Content built on the second set sounds like someone who understands, not someone who teaches.
The connection between listening and selling
This article isn’t really about content. I think it’s about trust.
When someone reads a post that uses the exact words they’ve been thinking but never said out loud, something shifts. They don’t think “this person is a good content creator.” They think “this person understands me.” And that, more than any posting schedule or hashtag, is what turns a follower into a client.
No amount of posting frequency, no hashtag strategy, no Reel with trending audio creates that feeling. Only specificity creates it. And specificity comes from listening.
I’ve watched this happen dozens of times. A coach changes nothing about their posting schedule, nothing about their platform, nothing about their visual branding. They just start using their audience’s language instead of their own. Enquiries go up. Not because the algorithm rewarded them. Because a real person felt understood for the first time.
That’s what I mean when I say this habit outsells every content strategy for coaches. Not because strategies are worthless. Because strategies without listening produce content that sounds professional and feels empty.
This is closely related to something I explored in Why Your Coaching Content Gets No Engagement Despite Being Right. Your content can be accurate, helpful, even well-written, and still not land. The missing ingredient isn’t quality. It’s recognition.
Where to listen (and where not to)
The best places to find honest audience language are the ones where people talk to peers, not to professionals.
Reddit is the richest source for most coaching niches. Anonymous posting means people write what they actually feel. Sort by “new” rather than “top” for rawer, less performed content. Search for the problem, not the profession. I go deeper on how to use Reddit specifically in How to Use Reddit to Understand Your Coaching Audience.
Facebook groups where people support each other, not where coaches run the show. A grief support group is more useful than a “grief coaching” group.
Amazon reviews of books in your niche. One-star and three-star reviews are gold. People describe exactly what they needed and didn’t get. A career coach could learn more from reviews of career change books than from any industry report.
Forums and Quora for niches where Reddit coverage is thin. Some communities still live on dedicated forums, especially health, parenting, and hobby niches.
Where not to look: your own comments section (they’re performing for you), coaching industry groups (coaches talking to coaches), competitor content (their audience’s public face, not their private struggles). If you’re not sure whether you’re hearing the filtered or unfiltered version, it’s probably filtered. The unfiltered version shows up in places where nobody expects a coach to be reading.
For a complete breakdown of the extraction process, Conversation Mining walks through step by step.
How to turn what you hear into what you write
Collecting language is half the habit. The other half is actually using it.
The mistake I see most often is this: a coach does the research, fills a document with raw quotes, and then sits down to write content and falls straight back into professional voice. The research document sits in a tab. The post comes from muscle memory.
A simple bridge between research and writing
Before you write anything, pick one sentence from your collection. One raw quote. Put it at the top of your draft as a reference point.
Now write your post as if you’re responding to that specific person. Not to “your audience” in the abstract. To the person who wrote “I rehearse what I’m going to say in meetings and then don’t say any of it.”
The shift is subtle but real. Writing to a specific person’s specific words produces content that sounds different from writing to a demographic. More concrete. More grounded. Less like a coach broadcasting and more like a person who noticed something.
The pattern that works
Open with their experience, in their language. Not a quote (you don’t have permission for that). But a scenario built from their reality.
Then offer one thing: an insight, a reframe, a practical suggestion. Just one. Not a grand plan. Not a five-step process. One thing they can hold in their hand.
Close with space, not a sales pitch. An observation. A question worth sitting with. Something that trusts the reader to take the next step when they’re ready.
Before and after
To make this concrete. Say you’re a career transition coach and you found this sentence in a Reddit thread: “I sit in meetings and think about what I’d be doing if I’d made different choices ten years ago.”
Without the research habit, you might write: “Feeling unfulfilled in your career? It might be time to explore what’s holding you back from the change you deserve.”
With the research habit, you might write: “There’s a specific kind of daydream that happens in meetings. Not about lunch or the weekend. About the version of your life where you made a different choice ten years ago. If that one’s familiar, this post is for you.”
Same topic. Same expertise behind it. But the second version makes someone’s breath catch, because it describes something they thought was just them.
This pattern works because it mirrors how people actually process help. They need to feel understood before they’re open to input. And they need room after the input lands, not a sales pitch. Push through any of those stages too fast and the whole thing collapses.
What happens when you stop listening
This is the part nobody warns you about. The habit works both ways. Start listening and your content improves. Stop listening and it quietly drifts back.
I watched it happen with a business coach who had a brilliant three months after doing her first proper audience research. She’d found language in small business owner forums that changed everything about how she wrote. Posts that used to get polite likes started generating DMs. People were booking discovery calls and saying “I felt like you were writing about me specifically.”
Then she got busy. Client work picked up, which was the whole point. The research habit dropped off. She kept posting, but the posts started coming from her professional vocabulary again. “Strategic planning for solopreneurs.” “Building your CEO mindset.” Accurate, polished, and completely disconnected from the person sitting in their spare bedroom at 11pm wondering whether they should just get a job.
Her enquiries slowed down over about six weeks. Not dramatically. Just a gradual thinning. She described it to me as “the well drying up” and assumed it was an algorithm change.
It wasn’t the algorithm. It was the vocabulary. She’d stopped refreshing the well. The language she was using had aged out. The problems hadn’t changed, but the way people described them had shifted slightly, and she was still writing from notes she’d made three months earlier.
This is why the habit needs to be ongoing, even if it’s only twenty minutes a week. Not because your audience research from last quarter was wrong. Because language is alive. It moves. What resonated in January might read as slightly off by April, not wrong, just a half-step behind. And your audience can feel that half-step even if they can’t name it.
The coaches who stay connected to their audience’s current vocabulary don’t just create better content. They create content that keeps working, month after month, because it never drifts out of alignment with how their people actually talk.
The objection I hear most often
“I don’t have time to read Reddit every week.”
Fair. But consider what you’re spending time on instead. If you’re spending two hours batch-creating content that doesn’t generate enquiries, that time is already being spent. Reallocating thirty minutes of it to reading what your audience actually says is not extra work. It’s shifting the foundation of the work you’re already doing.
I built Pain Point Pulse specifically because I hit this wall myself. I was doing the listening manually and it was working, but it takes time. PPP automates the collection and pattern-mapping across online sources so you get the language without the hours.
But if you’re not ready for a tool, the manual version is genuinely valuable. Twenty to thirty minutes a week. A running document. And the discipline to open it before you write.
That’s a content strategy for coaches that actually works. Not because it’s clever. Because it starts with the only thing that matters: knowing what your audience sounds like when they’re not talking to you.
How this connects to everything else
The weekly listening habit doesn’t replace other aspects of content creation. It precedes them.
Your content pillars still matter. They’re just built from evidence instead of expertise. Your posting schedule still matters, you’re just filling it with different material. And your brand voice doesn’t change at all. You’re starting from a different entry point, their experience, and bridging to your perspective from there.
What changes is the foundation. Instead of creating from what you know, you’re creating from what they feel. That single shift changes everything downstream. It changes your headlines, your opening lines, your calls to action, your entire relationship with the people reading your content.
The coaches who do this consistently, even imperfectly, even just a few times a month, outperform the ones with perfect strategies and beautiful content calendars. Not because strategy doesn’t matter. Because strategy without listening is just organised guessing.
I’ve seen this pattern enough times now to feel confident saying it. The boring habit of regular, structured listening is the single highest-return activity most coaches aren’t doing. Not because they don’t care about their audience. Because nobody told them it was this simple.
FAQ
How long before I notice results from this approach?
Most coaches see a difference within two to four weeks. Not in follower count, which is a lagging indicator anyway, but in the quality of responses they get. More DMs. More “it’s like you read my mind” comments. More people asking how to work with them. The shift happens fast because you’re not learning a new skill. You’re just changing what you read before you write.
What if I already do discovery calls? Isn’t that listening?
Discovery calls give you filtered language. The person on that call knows they’re talking to a coach. They’ve already adopted some of your vocabulary. They’re presenting a version of their problem shaped for a professional audience. What you find in anonymous forums at midnight is the unfiltered version. Both matter. But the unfiltered version is what attracts the people who haven’t found you yet.
Do I need to do this manually or can I use a tool?
Either works. Doing it manually at least once teaches you to read audience language in a way that no tool replicates. After that, Pain Point Pulse can automate the collection and pattern-mapping, pulling from online sources and delivering reports you can create from immediately. The comparison between manual and automated approaches is covered fully in Manual vs Automated Audience Research.
Won’t my content sound less professional if I use their language?
It’ll sound less like a coach and more like a person who understands. Those aren’t the same thing. The “less professional” feeling is usually just the absence of jargon. And jargon is what makes your ideal clients scroll past your posts without recognising that you’re talking about their problem. I explored this in What Your Audience Actually Wants to Hear.
How is this different from just copying what other coaches write?
Completely different. Copying other coaches gives you coach language, which is the thing that’s not working in the first place. That’s the Feedback Loop Problem in action. This habit bypasses coaches entirely. You’re going straight to the people who need coaching and haven’t found it yet. Their vocabulary is the one you need.
This article is part of The Complete Guide to Audience Research for Coaches and Consultants, a 29-part series on understanding the people you serve well enough to create content they actually respond to.
Pat Kelman. Come and look at this.
Image: Photo by Theo Decker on Pexels
